Last week, members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union at EPA released an internal Agency memo describing the Agency’s proposed plan to cut back on specific areas of enforcement in response to looming budget cuts in FY 2013. The memo, by Larry Starfield, EPA's Deputy Assistant Administrator in the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance lists “Areas of Proposed Budget Adjustment for FY13.” Federal agencies have an unenviable task: they must plan for budgets that are unpredictable; and at this time we don’t know where next year’s EPA budget will ultimately end up. Nonetheless, the proposals in the Starfield memo are troubling. The contingency plan it sets forth raises concerns about the future of enforcement at EPA.
Several points regarding proposed budget cuts at EPA seem worth noting. First, even the most draconian cuts to the Agency will do almost nothing to balance the federal budget since EPA appropriations account for less than a tenth of one per cent of total federal expenditures. Moreover, although cuts across the board are expected for many federal programs, cuts to EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance are particularly unwise because effective enforcement is critical to the integrity and success of EPA’s work—a fact well known to regulated industries and their supporters in Congress. EPA is already severely underfunded in a number of areas, including enforcement. Regrettably, these proposed cuts will further handicap the Agency’s ability to protect human health and the environment.
If cuts must be made, the Agency’s approach of prioritizing certain enforcement areas—rather than planning for completely equal cuts across the board—makes good sense. The goal of enforcement is to have a deterrent effect both on individual actors and groups of industries and municipalities. EPA’s contingency plan generally preserves a deterrent approach in a number of priority areas under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Superfund, and other environmental statutes. By pursuing cases in these priority areas, the Agency can maximize its resources.
Full texta(broad) perspective
Today’s post is second in a series on a recent CPR white paper, Reclaiming Global Environmental Leadership: Why the United States Should Ratify Ten Pending Environmental Treaties. Each month, this series will discuss one of these ten treaties. Previous posts are here.
Antarctica is the coldest, driest, highest, most pristine, and least inhabited continent, and it has the largest contained ecosystem on the planet. Home to whales, seals, penguins, petrels, and many animals and plants found nowhere else on earth, Antarctica also plays an integral role in regulating global environmental processes.
Though largely isolated from human contact, Antarctica is still vulnerable to degradation from human activities. For example, emissions of chemicals have caused a “hole” in the ozone layer over the southern pole, and emissions of greenhouse gases contribute to significant warming of the region. More directly, the unmatched opportunities for scientific research, commercial fishing, and tourism have all taken a toll on this unique environment. In addition to the 40 scientific stations on the continent, nearly 50,000 tourists visit every year. The increased tourism has increased the likelihood of marine accidents. In recent years, several ships have run aground, leaking fuel oil into the ocean.
Full textOne of the many ways that the slow and agonizing contraction of the newspaper industry is felt is in the depth of coverage that papers provide their readers. It’s a matter of simple math, really. As newsrooms shrink, reporters are stretched ever thinner. So a newspaper that 15 years ago had separate reporters covering elementary and secondary education is now likely to have just one covering both. Similarly, newspapers have fewer reporters dedicated to the environmental beat, let alone beats covering regulatory issues — topics at the heart of the Center for Progressive Reform’s work. The result is that many reporters don’t have time to take on stories they might once have covered, and if they do, they sometimes have a steeper learning curve and too little time to really dig in. That’s a recipe for simplistic coverage, which is just a nice way of saying bad coverage.
But I’d like to highlight two notable exceptions. On Tuesday, two of the nation’s leading newspapers offered stories about regulation that went far beyond the norm.
Think for a moment about the storyline on regulation for the past couple years. Republicans in Congress, intent on devising some rationale for the nation’s economic woes that does not point back to the failings of their own deregulatory policies, have resaddled their longstanding anti-regulatory campaign with a new and timely argument: that a supposed flood of regulations from the Obama Administration is choking off the recovery.
It’s a hard case to make if you stick to the facts. The truth is that regulations produce vastly more economic benefit than they cost – that is the purpose of the cost-benefit analysis wringer through which major regulations are fed before they are finalized. With very rare exception, if a regulation’s dollar benefits don’t exceed its dollar costs, it gets rewritten or killed. (And keep in mind that that the big failing of the cost-benefit process is that it overestimates costs and underestimates benefits.)
Full textThe toll: An estimated 6,500 to 17,967 premature deaths, 9,867 non-fatal heart attacks, 3,947 cases of chronic bronchitis, and more than 2.3 million lost work and school days. That's just a partial tally of the costs Americans will bear because of unjustified delays in two critical health and safety regulations. More broadly, the Administration’s Fall 2011 Regulatory Agenda—released late, at the end of January of 2012—shows how many of the most important rules currently in the regulatory pipeline are being similarly delayed, leaving people and the environment inadequately protected against a number of unreasonable risks, possibly for years to come.
Working from the latest regulatory agenda, a new CPR Issue Alert assesses the Obama Administration’s progress in completing 12 key regulatory actions identified in a CPR white paper issued last April. A group of CPR Member Scholars and CPR Policy Analysts warned in that paper that the Administration’s failure to bring a sense of urgency to the job of completing the rules had opened the door to the very real prospect that nine of the twelve might get caught up in the backwash of the 2012 presidential campaign, and indeed might never be completed by the current Administration.
That bleak prediction is coming true before our eyes. Progress on the great majority of these regulatory actions has been delayed further over the last 10 months, and it is now likely most of the rules will not go into effect during the current presidential term.
Full textA new study underscores the wisdom of reducing the risks of mercury and other pollutants rather than relying on risk avoidance measures such as fish consumption advisories. Mercury’s adverse effects are not limited to human health; its harms are felt throughout our ecosystems. According to this most recent study, released today by the Biodiversity Research Institute, mercury harms a broader swath of wildlife than previously recognized, including many bird species that are not piscivorous. This finding echoes those of studies in the Great Lakes published this fall, which concluded that a larger number of species were adversely affected by mercury contamination than previously understood by scientists.
From a regulatory perspective, the harms of mercury contamination might be addressed by risk reduction – measures that require the sources of mercury pollution to reduce or prevent mercury releases into the environment – or by risk avoidance – measures that leave it to those who are exposed to protect themselves from mercury permitted to enter or remain in the environment. The EPA’s recent rule regulating coal-fired power plants’ mercury emissions is an example of the former approach. An example of the latter approach was the George W. Bush administration’s suggestion, upon proposing an exceedingly lax rule for power plants (ultimately vacated by the D.C. Circuit), that people protect themselves from the continued mercury contamination by consulting national and local fish consumption advisories.
I have elaborated the many perils of relying on risk avoidance in lieu of risk reduction elsewhere. Among the limitations of depending on risk avoidance measures such as fish consumption advisories, ozone alerts, and “keep out” signs, are the facts that these measures are unjust and ineffective in practice. They simply don’t result in “the same amount” of protection for human health, as proponents of such measures hope.
Full textFor more than a century, the United States took the lead in organizing responses to international environmental problems. The long list of environmental agreements spearheaded by the United States extends from early treaties with Canada and Mexico on boundary waters and migratory birds to global agreements restricting trade in endangered species and protecting against ozone depletion. In the last two decades, however, U.S. environmental leadership has faltered.
The best-known example is the lack of an effective response to climate change, underscored by the U.S. decision not to join the Kyoto Protocol. But the attention climate change receives should not obscure the fact that the United States has also failed to join a large and growing number of treaties directed at other environmental threats, including marine pollution, the loss of biological diversity, persistent organic pollutants, and trade in toxic substances.
Today CPR publishes Reclaiming Global Environmental Leadership: Why the United States Should Ratify Ten Pending Environmental Treaties. My co-authors and I show the importance of ten treaties and urge the Obama Administration and Congress to work together to ratify them. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, these treaties do not generally raise difficult partisan issues. They were all negotiated with substantial U.S. input, and they all provide clear benefits to the United States – or they would if only the United States belonged to them.
Full textThe Obama Administration is sending mixed messages.
On the one hand, several top economic officials have noted the extensive evidence that a lack of demand, rather than regulation, is the cause of a slow economic recovery and low job creation. Yet the President himself has contradicted his economic advisers on the issue in a misguided effort to pander to industry concerns, leaving the Administration’s message confused.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, hardly the most progressive force in the Administration, said in October: “I don’t think there's good evidence in support of the proposition that it's regulatory burden or uncertainty that's causing the economy to grow more slowly than any of us would like.” Jan Eberly, Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy, laid out a significant batch of evidence in support of Geithner’s argument in a subsequent blog post.
Austan Goolsbee, Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors until August, appeared to hold a similar position. Asked in his final days whether regulations were hindering the economy, he said that there were certainly “individual things that could be done different and streamlined, where, you know, they have to submit paper forms, they can’t do it on the web, you know, things of this nature.” But: “as a general matter, no.” (He indeed gave a spirited defense of regulations).
So it’s frustrating to see that in other instances, the Administration sends a message that is in direct contradiction with the assessments of Geithner, Eberly, and Goolsbee. In an appearance with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper last week, President Obama declared:
Full text… we’re ramping up our effort to get rid of outdated, unjustified regulations that stifle trade and job creation.
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Yesterday, Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment hosted a public presentation by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. She delivered brief prepared remarks, then took a lot of questions. She didn’t announce any new policy initiatives, but she did make it clear that she (and the President) are not going to cave to pressure from Republicans in the House.
Jackson did seem glad to be well outside the Beltway for a while, and who can blame her? She noted that the House has taken some 170 anti-environmental votes this term, more than one for every day it has been in session. And she’s been called in for a number of grillings. Although she faced some difficult questions in Berkeley, she noted that at least Dan Farber, who moderated the questions, didn’t frame each of them as a five-minute tirade against the EPA, and that she was actually given time to respond. She didn’t shy away from any of the questions, which covered the gamut from the delay in issuing new ozone regulations to EPA’s role in the Keystone Pipeline decision to regulation of concentrated animal feeding operations and of toxic chemicals.
This is the first time I’ve seen Jackson speak in person. I was very impressed, with two things standing out for me. First, she truly does seem optimistic despite facing a hostile Congress and challenging (to put it mildly) budget times. She’s clearly both tough and resilient. Second, she has absolute command of what’s going on in her agency, not just on the regulatory side but also at the research labs, and also of the network of interrelated initiatives at other agencies. Whether you agree with EPA’s decisions under her watch or not (and probably most of us, wherever we stand on the political spectrum, can find something to disagree with), you have to respect Administrator Jackson and her approach to her job. She’s the kind of public servant I’d like to see more of in Washington.
Video of the session should be available on the CLEE website soon.
Full textThe blog post was co-authored by Rena Steinzor and James Goodwin.
When President Obama issued his new Executive Order 13563 this past January – the one calling on agencies to “look-back” at existing regulations –speculation abounded as to what, if any effect, it would have on agencies’ rulemaking. Setting aside the look-back plan provisions (and the President’s unproductive anti-regulation rhetoric in the Wall Street Journal), the new Order didn’t seem to add much to the 18-year-old Executive Order 12866, save for a few broad platitudes relating to regulatory policy. But the President’s decision to kill EPA’s new ozone standard suggests that the new Order can and will be used to weaken regulations.
Last Thursday, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Congress that the Obama Administration would revert to the ozone standard set by the Bush Administration: 75 parts per billion (ppb) in ambient air. Of course, EPA’s expert, blue ribbon scientific advisory board had unanimously recommended that the agency lower this standard to somewhere between 60 and 70 ppb. A 60 ppb standard for ozone would have prevented up to 12,000 premature deaths, 5,300 non-fatal heart attacks, 2,200 cases of chronic bronchitis, 420,000 lost work days, and 2,100,000 missed school days every year. A 70 ppb standard would have prevented up to 4,300 premature deaths, 2,200 non-fatal heart attacks, 880 cases of chronic bronchitis, 170,000 lost work days, and 600,000 missed school days. Under the 75 ppb standard, those benefits will effectively be cut in half. The Bush standard, now apparently the Obama standard, is projected to prevent only 2,100 premature deaths, 1,300 non-fatal heart attacks, 470 cases of chronic bronchitis, 88,000 lost work days, and 190,000 missed school days.
At a growing number of contaminated sites across the nation, “cleanup” means that toxic contaminants are left in place while environmental agencies look to institutional controls (ICs) to limit human contact with these contaminants. Agencies hope that ICs such as deed restrictions or advisory signs will inform people about the continued presence of contaminants at a site and help them steer clear, thus avoiding exposure. Yet agencies have done little to ascertain whether these hopes are well-founded, particularly over the long term. Against this backdrop, EPA released guidance last month that for the first time seeks to systematize its evaluation of ICs. The guidance directs EPA investigators conducting five-year reviews to determine whether ICs called for as part of site cleanups have actually been implemented and maintained. This guidance is a welcome first step. But larger questions remain about agencies’ increased reliance on ICs and other forms of “risk avoidance.”
Contaminated site cleanup tends to conjure images of so-called engineering measures such as dredging or excavation. These measures actually remove contaminated substances from the site or treat them so that they become less toxic. With toxic contaminants no longer present, risks to humans and the environment are reduced. Institutional controls, by contrast, are administrative or legal measures intended to address those instances in which toxic contaminants have been permitted to linger at a site, such that risks to humans and the environment remain. According to EPA, “ICs typically work by limiting land or resource use and/or by providing information that helps modify or guide human behavior at the site.” Institutional controls include proprietary controls, such as restrictive covenants or easements; government controls, such as zoning ordinances or ground water use regulations; legal tools such as consent decrees that limit permitted activities at a site; and informational measures, such as state registries of contaminated sites, posted signage, and fish and wildlife consumption advisories.
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